“Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub,” wrote George Orwell, “entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.” This sentiment is on stark display in the work of novelist Graham Greene, whose adulterous relationship (with the very married Catherine Welston, a wealthy farmer’s wife) propelled him to scrutinize the mechanics…
Writer-director Anthony Minghella has chosen to follow up his Oscar-laden The English Patient with another literary adaptation — this time, of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Highsmith is known to film buffs as the author of Strangers on a Train, the basis for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers; but…
How do you spend nearly 24 hours a day with another person for an entire year and not end up divorced, insane, or homicidal? Ask historian/Miami native Cesar Becerra and journalist/Connecticut Yankee Maud Dillingham. The married couple recently hit the road in their restored 1979 Chevrolet Malibu Classic station wagon…
Where the hell were the dancing hippos? That was the first question raised immediately after a screening of Disney’s new Fantasia/2000, a retooled, souped-up, IMAX version of the original animated 1940 flick, which succeeded in terrifying children around the world, pretty much assuring they would never in a million years…
The single poignant moment in Buddy — The Buddy Holly Story depicts an imperiously fragile moment of rock and roll history, the one in which protorocker Buddy Holly wrote the song “Everyday.” Not the best or the most popular of Holly’s work, the tune nonetheless is charming, and so much…
At first glance Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within ten minutes the heroine’s seventeen-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…
Let’s hear it for sports movies! The most avid sports fan occasionally can be bored by lackluster games, but the casual spectator also can appreciate what the big screen can do for an athletic contest, even one played by actors rather than athletes: the closer-than-life closeups, the dramatic use of…
Ah, what a miracle that Andy Kaufman was. So sublime his wit, so pioneering his spirit. Astonishing! A hero to be loved, adored, and emulated by all artists and performers for the rest of eternity. An opener of doors, a smasher down of barriers, a glorious, luminous, intrepid spirit without…
Smack-dab in the middle of the sidewalk along Washington Avenue stands an old bridge tender’s house, a small steel hut that once upon a time overlooked the Miami River. The presence of this glistening anachronism in the heart of South Beach is weird in itself, but what’s even weirder is…
Horses gallop, bugles blare, swords clang. An abusive Sean Connery-sounding voice taunts you, urging you to surrender. You aren’t deep in the heat of battle. You’re playing chess, the parlor game of choice for intelligent kids (okay, geeks), with one Ivan the Terrible. It’s not a dream. The Russian ruler…
Like most people at a recent performance of Arje Shaw’s powerful work The Gathering, I had tears in my eyes by the end of the two-hour drama. And like many around me, I suspect, I found the plight of Gabe, the Holocaust survivor at its center, imperiously heart-wrenching. All the…
The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty twelve-year-old daughter Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life, or something like one, in…
Long before Ricky Martin was a glimmer in his mother’s eye, real and imaginary Latins were insinuating themselves into the American psyche. Take Babalu Aye. Thanks to Cuban entertainer Desi Arnaz (the actor/singer who played the beleaguered Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy), who frequently was seen banging a drum…
In the multimedia performance memoryscan, New York-based modern dancer, choreographer, and composer Koosil-ja Hwang wields the instruments of Nineties pop culture like a scientist. The 39-year-old Hwang and her company, Dance KUMIKOKIMOTO, are the subjects of inquiry, relating personal memories through abstract movement, gesture, sound, and monologue. Hwang’s scalpels are…
It is rare to find a movie that is as accomplished, multilayered, and rewarding as the novel from which it was adapted, but The Cider House Rules is such a film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?), the film displays the kind of…
Harmony Korine’s directorial debut, Gummo, was like a hard smack to the face of contemporary cinema. Relentlessly nonlinear, filled with disturbing imagery and impossible to synopsize, it caused many viewers to wince in pain, and persuaded even more to walk quickly past its poster of a slightly misshapen child’s head…
True Identity at the Dorsch Gallery is a new show comprising 21 works, most of them woodcuts, by local artisan Brian Reedy (a young teacher at Florida International University and the University of Miami). In this exhibit Reedy explores issues of self intensely, to put it mildly. His images parallel…
Viscerally exciting, dramatically riveting, emotionally overwhelming, Patrice Chéreau’s Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train definitely is one of the finest works of modern French cinema. That’s easily said. The hard part is citing the fact that it’s also the greatest gay film ever made. We all know the…
Over nine days beginning Saturday, December 11, the Miami Jewish Film Festival, in its third year, will unspool 32 films, mostly at the Regal on South Beach. While the movies all have a Jewish connection, this year’s offerings are an impressively varied and top-quality lot. A few are familiar, such…
Six dancers dressed in white run their hands along their arms, cleansing themselves with invisible water. They push against the air as if sliding into a pool or rising from a river. The gesture is simple, repeated over and over in choreographer Ronald K. Brown’s work Water. The dancers’ arms…
To quote fictitious talk show hostess Linda Richman: “Talk amongst yourselves.” Here’s a topic: Potential members of The South Beach Gay Men’s Chorus don’t have to be gay or male. Discuss. Yes, you heard right. Men and women of any sexual orientation are welcome to join the three-month-old nonprofit organization…
The seedy Berlin of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is so familiar to us that to encounter the sedate world of John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera is something of a shock. Instead of the Kit Kat Club, we get Christopher Isherwood’s tiny apartment; in place of goose-stepping Nazis, we…
